Catherine Classic
Cheat on your partner and pay the price in Catherine Classic’s offbeat mix of puzzle game and life sim.
What next, Persona 5 on PC? It’s hard not to believe that’ll happen someday soon, now that I have got Catherine in my Steam library. It’s been an exciting few years for previously console-only cult classics coming to PC, especially from the likes of SEGA. Catherine is a real oddity: Part-relationship and life simulator, and part-pretty good block-climbing puzzle game. What’s appealing is its unusual subject matter. You’re Vincent, a 30-something in a long-term relationship with Katherine, who wants to settle down, and for Vincent to find a better-paying job. Vincent, though, wakes up next to another girl called Catherine. After cheating, he begins to experience nightmares where he’s in his underwear, climbing towers of collapsing blocks. The men who fall to their deaths in this hellscape are dying in real life.
The main part of the game is climbing and pushing the blocks in order to ascend these towers, dealing with occasional modifiers like slippy blocks made of ice, or blocks that are traps. It’s about figuring out your next few moves in advance: Building a staircase to reach the next rung of the column, or pushing out a few base blocks to make the entire tower drop down by one.
At the end of each set of levels, a kind of boss creature appears, manifesting as one of Vincent’s worries: a giant screaming demonic baby, for example, or a giant evil butt (seriously). It can be incredibly tricky, and it’s possible to push enough blocks away to make it impossible to reach the exit at the top. Luckily, there’s a rewind function to take back your last few moves, and even on normal mode, checkpoints and retries are fairly generous.
The life sim element of the game breaks up these intense puzzles. Before Vincent sleeps, he hangs out with his friends in a bar. Here he interacts with his pals, some of whom admonish him for his repeated cheating, as well as the interesting patrons of the bar who all have their own stories. You’ll meet people in this bar who’ll then appear in your dreams as sheep, which is kind of eerie—they’ve cheated too, and they are now paying the price.
I like Catherine as a puzzle game, but I don’t love it. The towers are repetitive to climb, and a couple of the modifiers are really annoying: Being knocked off a specific block by a boss’s super ability, for example, or encountering enemies who can knock you down as well.
I actually think Catherine is slightly stronger as a life sim, where you can pore over Vincent’s situation, and make decisions based on what you think is right or wrong. You can text back both Katherine and Catherine, and whatever you choose to put in the text from a number of predetermined options will push a good or evil slider a certain way. If you want Vincent to cheat, go for it. If you want to be faithful to Katherine and make up for your mistakes, you can do that too.
cheat code
You don’t shape the story, really— mostly just the ending—but the subject matter is so unusual that just being asked these things by a game is refreshing. Its portrayal has some problems. By never remembering the times he sleeps with Catherine, he doesn’t really have to take responsibility for it. Likewise, Katherine’s depiction in the game frames commitment as being this incredibly scary thing that’s being inflicted on Vincent, a man who’s pathetically helpless when it comes to making his own decisions.
Catherine, meanwhile, represents the opposite of that—she’s interested in Vincent and designed to be the object of his lust, allowing him to throw aside the things he’s afraid of and cheat. Both women are depicted as controlling figures in his life and not much more. While the game definitely has interesting things to say about adult relationships, this is also an excuse to have an anime lady send you naughty pictures, or for gratuitous camera angles. It can be insightful, but heavy on fan service.
It’s such a strange combination, to have these puzzles and life sim elements awkwardly welded together, but it just about works. Catherine is a memorable experience, and while my opinion of its themes changes the older I get, I still find being asked questions like, ‘Who’s responsible when someone cheats?’ by a game exciting. The fact it’s now on PC, in a well-priced edition like this, is a treat.
It’s about figuring out your next few moves in advance